Something Stronger
by babybaguette
Summary: There was a force greater than moral obligation keeping Bucky from shooting himself in the stomach. Something deeper than fear and more powerful than hatred of the thing. It was what he felt when he remembered all those times he stood up for Steve in an alley or behind a diner, or made his friend chicken soup when he was too weak to do it himself. It was love.
1. Chapter 1

They'd only ever really woken him up to show him the new arm. Otherwise, during all those procedures and mind-wipes and grueling experiments, the Winter Soldier had been asleep. Even Nazis had compassion, it seemed.

That time they'd let his drugs wear off, he blinked his eyes open for the first time in what felt like years. It might've actually been years, but there was no way to tell. He didn't have any prior memories to base the passing of time off of, anyway. No, that was a lie. His first and last memory; being dragged through the snow, a river of red in his wake. Now, he started his second memory.

His vision was fuzzy and his head ached, like waking up from a bad hangover. It was bright, too bright, and it took a while for his eyes to adjust. First, it was just shapes. White shapes and green shapes. Then the shapes had arms, heads, masks, glasses. He could pick out individual forms, holding clipboards and tools. Checking machines.

The Soldier soon realized that he, too, had a body. Sensation slowly returned to him and he felt the firm mattress beneath him, the thin sheet covering his naked form, and a cold object laying next to his body. He tried moving. He tested his arms to try and grab the metal thing to his left… only to find the metal thing move with him.

His arms came up from under the sheet. His right felt as it should; fleshy, warm, still tingling from the drugs. But the left hardly felt at all. He didn't feel the dry fabric as it brushed his skin, because he didn't have skin. Once his arms were in view, the Soldier saw a metal arm. Moving as he told it to, obeying his neural commands. Acting like it was a part of him.

The machine extended up to his collar bone and deep into his flesh. When he moved he felt it grate on his bones.

Panic began to set in. He realized that he was in a strange facility, with no memories or recollection of who he was. He had a _metal arm _and he was about ninety percent sure he shouldn't. He turned to his first impulsory reaction; violence.

The doctors nearest to him had chosen a poor place to stand. He grabbed them and started beating them; he found the metal arm to be a lot stronger than he thought. They tried to sedate him, but anyone that got too close was fair game for swinging.

Eventually, of course, they brought out the guns. He didn't have a whole lot of memories, but he knew what those were. He knew how to use one. He knew what they could do to you. He dropped the bleeding man in his grip and lowered his hands: the new and the old.

The Soldier leveled his gaze as a new man entered the room; another doctor. Small, with glasses and no hair. Something about him seemed familiar. Images of this man's silhouette against bright lights, the clinking and cuffs and the hiss of syringes, flashed into his mind.

"So, you are awake!" the doctor said, raising his hands in a warm welcome. Was he a friend? "We were waiting for you, you know. Although, I suppose we did give you an awful lot of drugs." The doctor reached the table. His voice sounded… odd. The voice inside the Soldier's head had a different accent than his. Was that right?

"You have been our guinea pig for quite some time, now. We ran a lot of tests. Did many things to you. Some of them for the better. Some of them with no consequence, merely for… scientific purposes." The doctor chuckled. The Soldier felt like he should be fighting. But fighting who? How do you know who's friend or foe when you can't even remember who you are?

The doctor was now within punching distance. But there were still too many guns. The doctor knew, and took advantage of this to get into the Soldier's personal space.

"I don't expect you to remember who I am," he said. "I am Arnim Zola." A grin spread across Zola's face. "I am your creator."

* * *

From the moment he woke up, the Winter Soldier was mentally a virgin. He had no memory of any sexual endeavors from whatever came before the ravine. His entire mental file cabinet started at being dragged through the snow. All he knew now was that he was employed, whether he liked it or not, to kill.

His work was remarkably easy. Even easier when he found out that his body knew what it was doing with a gun. His first day on his feet, they handed him a rifle and told him to hit a target from a hundred yards away. He hit the bullseye.

As soon as his missions commenced, it was up to the Soldier to maintain a completely professional attitude towards them. Locate the target, do the job, get out and report back to HYDRA for cryo. In the blink of an eye, there was a new group of scientists waking him up for a new job in a new decade.

Bucky traveled all over the world and throughout time. He saw glimpses of what the world was becoming, how it transformed, while he was asleep in a cold box. It made him curious, and while he may not have had any memory of ever actually having sex, that didn't mean the urge wasn't there. Even brainwashed assassins had labito.

There was one assignment in the seventies where said labito actually helped to get the job done quicker. A young man, a politician, with ambitions and an agenda that HYDRA didn't quite agree with was getting too popular for their liking. A politician notorious for his escapades with members of the same sex. They sent in their best man to do it quietly.

Ask the Winter Soldier and he'll say that that night in the hotel was anything but quiet.

After the Soldier had sated his needs, he finished the job and went right back into cryo. He was still glowing the next time they pulled him out.

HYDRA never found out. All they knew was that the young politician was found tangled in soiled sheets the next morning by room service with a bullet in his brain.

The Soldier had no reason to think this would have any sort of bearing on his future. He had no reason to suspect that that one event in the seventies would have any affect on his life in 2014.

* * *

He'd had hard targets before. Targets who thought they could fight back. He let them, sometimes, just to get in a good fight to make sure he wasn't getting soft. He'd toy with an assignment for a while before letting them know he'd had them under his thumb the whole time.

But not this time. When they woke him up in the early 21st century, he was, in a word, cranky. This had never happened before, but as he was recovering from the ice, he remembered they'd put him down just as he was getting over a bout of food poisoning in the nineties. The Soldier chocked it up to that and prepared to be shipped off to Washington, D.C.

The target's name was Nick Fury, and he would not be getting any special treatment. The Winter Soldier wanted this over with; no playing with his food this time. Get in, get it done, get out, go back to sleep.

Now, everytime HYDRA woke him up, they tried their best in the short amount of time they had to catch him up on new technological advances. There were a few things he didn't need to know about, like VCR's or coffee makers. What he needed most was advances in weaponry.

As he stalked away from a burning SUV, he seethed at HYDRA's failing to mention handheld car/asphalt cutters. The 21st century was a little too impressive for the Soldier's tastes.

After the target's disappearance, he didn't want to return to HYDRA for debriefing. He needed to finish the hunt.

Unfortunately, his body had other ideas.

Almost as soon as he was off-stage, the vomiting started. The bile rose in his throat and he only just had enough time to get his mask off before he was retching behind a dumpster in a dark alleyway. Still sick with food poisoning, he reasoned. Never trust French diners again.

The tired Soldier leaned against the brick wall and slid down. His gun fell into his lap and he waited until the nausea had passed to even think about moving.

It was another hour of retching and resting at intervals before he picked up the chase.

Nick Fury was a hard man to find. It was times when he was out of cryo this long that he began to wonder what his targets did to deserve their harsh sentence. Not just to die, but to die at the hands of an invisible man. Fury seemed like an incredibly capable man with a lot of resources. It could be for those reasons alone that HYDRA wanted him dead.

After some collaboration from HYDRA's techies, triangulating street camera sightings and triple-tracing any and every bug in the area, Fury was found in an obscure apartment just outside the inner city.

He aimed. He fired. His job was done.

A minor slip-up on a rooftop made him late for his meeting with Pierce, but Pierce could afford to wait. Especially when there had been something about that man… The man on the roof. He'd felt this same way before, this sort of vague recognition, when he caused a car crash a couple decades back. But this was ten times stronger. This was outward familiarity.

He didn't like it.

* * *

"Who the hell is Bucky," he murmured, "who the hell is Bucky. Who the hell is Bucky."

In the depths of a HYDRA facility, the Winter Soldier lay on a cot in a dark room. He was expected to get some sleep, but he couldn't remember how to fall asleep on his own. He needed the ice to do it for him.

"Who the hell is Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky…"

Soon an agent would come to wake him up so they could fix his arm and get the mission report. They didn't need to go to the trouble; the Soldier was already awake in his cot, his stomach roiling with nausea and nostalgia.

That man on the bridge. He knew him.

* * *

Swimming with a metal arm was hard. Swimming with a metal arm, and a broken arm, while dragging a man twice your size behind you, was really hard. Swimming with a metal arm, and a broken arm, while dragging a man twice your size, and battling the urge to vomit or pass out or both, was the hardest. He'd also been punched, crushed, stabbed, suffocated, and mentally augmented. It wasn't his day. He needed to get back to HYDRA. Go back into cryo.

"Winter Soldier to base," he sputtered into his com. No reply. The com was either fried by the explosions and the water, or something was horribly wrong.

Upon further inspection, everything was horribly wrong.

HYDRA was exposed. SHIELD was shut down. There was no one to run to or from.

The Winter Soldier was, for the first time in his memory, alone.

He stood in the woods at the edge of the Potomac for a long time, pacing, sitting, puking. He realized after some time that he was bleeding from several spots on his body and there was probable bruising on the entirety of his legs and upper torso from where the beam crushed him. His midsection was feeling a bit tender, as well. He needed a place to hide and patch himself up. He needed clothes. He needed food, shelter, water. He needed a name.

He had to latch on to the only thing anyone had ever called him other than "the Winter Soldier" or "the Asset".

It had been a few hours and the explosions had died down from the direction of the Triskelion. He decided it was time to go before the authorities started combing the woods.

"Bucky," he said to himself as he made his way through the thicket. "Bucky it is."

* * *

Bucky puked into another trash can. It smelled like rotten lettuce and cigarettes in there and that made him more nauseous so he puked again. Someone bumped into him and yelled at him to get a job. Someone throwing away their coffee told him to lay off the drinks. What he would give for a few guns and diplomatic immunity.

Unfortunately, he was no longer invisible. There was no corrupt government agency to cover his tracks anymore. Everything he did had consequence.

He hadn't been able to find a job. He didn't know what he was good at, other than shooting people, and he doubted anyone in D.C. was looking to hire an assassin. A homeless, sickly one at that.

He'd been living off of shelters, soup kitchens, and stolen goods for weeks. Sleeping on park benches and huddling around burning oil drums with the best of them. The constant sickness that plagued him hadn't gone away, and it hadn't gotten any better or any worse. But now he was sensitive to things like smell, rough textures, hot temperatures, and the lack of fighting and general activity was making him gain weight. Bucky knew he should go in search of a doctor, and money to pay for one. But how do you earn money if you have no talent or trade? How do you get a job if you still have no idea who you are?

He'd just swiped a few tens out of a passing man's loose pocket when he realized that there were ways he could find out who he was. Who he used to be.

In one of his debriefings, he'd learned his target was in similar nature to himself, in that he was a sort of time traveler. Captain America was what he went by. The man on the bridge. The man who'd told him his name. When they were in the Helicarrier, the man who insisted they'd grown up together. That they were friends. Best friends.

He used those tens to buy himself a ticket into the Smithsonian, and into an exhibit where he hoped to find out a little about himself.

He realized, as he walked invisible in the crowd of people, that it might be a little vain to assume his past self was important enough to get a place amongst all the grand paraphernalia and inspirational propaganda. Captain America only knew him. That didn't mean he got his own placard in a museum.

As it turned out, Bucky was fortunately and gratefully wrong. The man known as James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes got a whole wall to himself. He even had an outfit of dark blue hanging with the others.

Bucky approached the glass wall. His own face looked right back at him; a face seen in reflections of car windows before a bullet shatters them, or in a pool of water before he dives in- or, lately, in gas station restrooms, in dirty mirrors, or in passing shop windows. The same eyes, mouth, cheeks, and chin. But that face printed in large on the glass was also very different. It was a face full of concern and sadness, neither of which the Winter Soldier had experienced in great quantities. There was determination in those eyes, in the eyes of the childhood friend of Steve Rogers, where Bucky saw none in his own.

He shook his head free of cloudy thoughts and read the passage next to his picture. The more he read, the more he admired this man; James Buchanan Barnes, holding his own in the mean streets of Brooklyn, getting good grades, being drafted for the war. Defending his friend, Steve, until the very end.

Or, what they thought was the end. The end of Bucky Barnes heralded the beginning of the Winter Soldier, and instead of defending Steve Rogers, he was trying to kill him instead. But that era had also come to an end. There was no more HYDRA. No more scientists programming him into a killing machine, no more generals telling him who to kill. The only evidence that he'd ever been that man was his arm. It was quite a reminder, but not one he couldn't get around.

He could get a job. An apartment. Finally scrape up some money to go to a doctor. He could start a new life. He could start living as Bucky Barnes.

* * *

Bucky Barnes decidedly did not have a good life.

After his visit to the museum, things started to come back. Memories. At first, they felt fake. Fabricated. Like they belonged to someone else. But slowly, everything started to fit into place; flashes of fights behind movie theatres, sitting in a diner with a pretty blonde girl, listening to jazz music while cooking dinner. Steve. He was starting to piece together his life from the forties.

Unfortunately, this did nothing to help his life in the 21st century. He'd never needed money before, when HYDRA took care of all his expenses, so he had to go on what he could put together from his old life.

He didn't count on inflation.

An apartment was double what he remembered paying, and when he tried to get a coffee with a dime, he was laughed out of the store. Thankfully, minimum wage had gone up a good seven bucks, but it was still barely enough.

He was still getting sick. And gaining weight, despite his hardly ever eating anything. A side effect of being out of cryo for so long, he told himself. It'll get better once I'm adjusted, he told himself. In the meantime, he needed a new home.

New York seemed like the likeliest candidate. Get back to Brooklyn, back to his roots. So he hitchhiked it up there with five weeks worth of savings from washing dishes and a few articles of stolen clothing.

Flop houses and hostels were to be his refuge until he could get the cheapest apartment money could buy. It seemed housing in New York was cheaper than he anticipated, though- much more expensive than the last time he rented an apartment, but cheaper than anything in D.C.

Due to a rash of alien attacks, super-powered maniacs, and evil-genius hacks, rent had gone down and insurance rates had gone up. Good news for former super-villains in need of an apartment.

So, while Bucky Barnes didn't live a good life, working minimum wage and stealing for food and living in a too-small apartment in a dangerous city, he didn't live a completely horrible one. Everytime he looked in the mirror and saw his arm, he was reminded of how it could be much worse.

* * *

Most memories he got back, he was grateful to have. His SSN, for instance. He was glad to have remembered that; even if it was invalid now that he was officially dead, it meant that he was beginning to gain access into his most personal thoughts. The crush he had on a girl named Doris in high school- she was probably either dead or close to it by now, though. The time he played baseball in the street during college and hit the ball clean through somebody's window. Taking care of Steve when he got sick, which seemed to happen on a regular basis.

Bucky's memories of pre-serum Steve were his favorites. Fighting alongside his skinny, sickly friend in back alleys and parking lots, coming home and patching up. Going to bars and having to drag a very drunk and very opinionated Steve away from a potential bar fight. Getting in between Steve and a man twice his size and avoiding a trip to the hospital.

Steve got in a lot of fights, when Bucky reflected on it. It seemed half his memories of his friend consisted of brawls or squabbles. But Steve always seemed to be the better man in the fights. He only ever fought for something he believed in; if a guy was being rude to a girl, or if there was a kid being picked on, or if there was a mugger on the street. Steve would stand up to them all, independent of size or weapon.

Bucky supposed that was what made him worthy of being Captain America.

He wondered what he'd done to be worthy of being the Winter Soldier.

Thoughts like this would come to him, sometimes. Mostly late at night, when he would look out the window at a broken city still recovering from a massive disaster that'd happened not two years ago. It made him think of all the wreckage, all the damage he'd caused in the fifty-or-so years he'd been the Soldier. All the bombs he'd set off and guns he'd fired. Property damage, vehicle damage, and human collateral damage.

And that brought back memories of the war.

The first one came in the middle of the night, as he tried to find sleep. His neighborhood wasn't in the nicest or the safest part of the city; gunshots were seldom rare. A gun was fired down the road and as Bucky heard it through an open window, it sent him reeling back sixty years to the battlefield. He lay, crouched in a dugout, clutching his rifle like it was life support. All around him, men were firing, throwing grenades, or dropping like sacks of flour. His boots sank ankle-deep into the mud and it took all his remaining stamina just to walk. The air smelled like gunpowder and rotting flesh.

The memory was so vivid it chased away any hopes of sleep and sent him back to the bathroom, vomiting and crying until the sun rose.

He didn't want these flashbacks. War wasn't what shaped James Buchanan Barnes- it's what killed him. But he supposed, if he didn't get everything back, there would still remain a little bit of the Winter Soldier. He needed to flush that all out, even if it meant reliving the second world war.

The flashbacks got worse. They invaded his dreams most of the time, and he often awoke, curled around his stomach, almost… protectively. But soon the war began to creep into his waking life. Walking down the street, he'd see HYDRA troops instead of pedestrians. A tank instead of a garbage truck.

One unlucky soul tried to mug him on his way home one night. Bucky broke both his wrists and stole his gun. He almost killed him. What others saw as a mugger pleading for his life, he saw Nazi scum kneeling before him, spouting off his manifest destiny bullshit routine. About to pop a cyanide pill. He almost killed him.

But something stopped him. A sensation, low in his belly; almost like butterflies. It brought him back- grounded him. Bucky lowered the gun and took his finger off the trigger. He didn't, however, give it back. The gun was stuffed in his waistband and the mugger was knocked unconscious.

As soon as he was home, Bucky searched for that feeling again; he searched his body, mentally and physically, for any sign of the butterflies. Tearing off his jacket and shirt, he went into the bathroom and looked himself up and down in the mirror. His hands hesitated at his belt, where the gun was wedged between his pants and his lower belly, an area that'd been the subject of significant weight gain ever since the Helicarriers.

Bucky's rough, weapon-hewn hands- one skin and bone, the other cold metal- closed on top of the odd bump in his flesh. It could no longer be mistaken for fat; it was too round and felt too firm, and now it was making movements inside him.

So what was it?

A thought crossed his mind that almost made him gag; what if this was one of HYDRA's experiments? Zola had said something to him, that first day, what was it… that they'd done things to him, purely for scientific purposes. This had to be one of them.

In that case, it was part of the Winter Soldier's life, and he had to get rid of it.

Bucky grabbed the gun from his waistband and with shaky hands, pressed the muzzle to his skin. Whatever was in his belly, it was put there by HYDRA, and that meant it was dangerous. If Bucky died trying to kill it, then so be it. He was just collateral damage.

But something stopped him. His finger was on the trigger, but his hands were getting shakier and shakier by the second. Tears welled up in his eyes and his breath hitched. He kept telling himself that he had to do this, that if he was going to do any good in this world, it was to kill that thing inside of him. He had to make up for all the assassinations, all those people he'd blindly killed. It was better if he died with it.

But he couldn't. He just couldn't.

There was a force greater than moral obligation keeping Bucky from shooting himself in the stomach. Something deeper than fear and more powerful than hatred of the thing. It was what he felt when he remembered all those times he stood up for Steve in an alley or behind a diner. It was what he felt when he made his friend chicken soup in the dead of night because Steve was too weak to do it for himself.

It was love and it was protectiveness. He loved that lump of skin, and he just couldn't bring himself to shoot it- to shoot himself. The gun fell the the floor with a loud thud, and Bucky followed soon after. He slid down the wall and cried frustrated tears until he passed out.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve Rogers didn't trust a lot of people. Anyone he felt he could trust in the past was either dead or had done something to revoke that trust, and both of those categories seemed to be increasing in number everytime he turned his back.

So when Steve said he trusted in Sam Wilson, it was a compliment higher than it outwardly seemed. The man had saved his life more times over the past week than Steve could count, and was willing to follow him blindly on what could possibly be a wild goose chase after his long-lost friend. Possibly across the world.

Steve was going to use his Avengers funding and whatever he had leftover from SHIELD to get around. He abandoned his apartment in D.C. and packed up his shield. Sam gave his landlord notice and packed up his guns and kevlar. The wings, unfortunately, were fried. They sent them off to Tony to see what he could do, but in the meantime Sam was just like any other soldier, following his captain.

This was very important to Steve. This was his childhood friend, the man who was practically his brother. Who'd protected him from so many of those back alley bullies; who'd helped him out when he was in a tight spot, financially, mentally, and emotionally. Bucky was family. Steve didn't care that he didn't remember who he was, or that he'd tried to kill him a few times and almost succeeded. Bucky was worth saving.

But they didn't know where to start. How do you find a man who's been invisible for sixty years? Even Natasha had said it was impossible. That he was a ghost.

But that was when Bucky had HYDRA to hide behind. So that's where Steve and Sam started; in the wreckage of an organization that was HYDRA, Nazi Science Division. There were several bunkers they already knew the location of, and they were sure to hold some clue. Unfortunately, hacking information out of them was out of the question; the US government had appropriated all forms of digital data off of the internet. Natasha's info leak had been eye-opening, but only for so long. The two had to take what they could get from all the hard copies they found at the bunkers.

The HYDRA base under a D.C. bank yielded little but some discarded machinery and bins full of ash, no doubt from the scientists trying to keep their work away from prying eyes. Steve suggested they try and dig through whatever remained of the camp in New Jersey, but when they got there, it was reduced to rubble. What wasn't taken out in the explosion had been torn down by the state.

HYDRA had bunkers and bases all over the country. Steve and Sam had found them by using a new strategy of theirs; Zola had told them that they'd used Bucky to shape the century, to change history. So the two were scouring every scene of every major assassination in the last sixty years, in the high hopes that they were right. They found one in Memphis, Los Angeles, several in New York, and San Francisco, along with many , most of them were abandoned due to every member of HYDRA either being a self-sacrificial nutcase or a cowardly lion. Any stragglers that were left, Captain America and Falcon had no problem taking care of them.

They tried interrogating a few known HYDRA agents, using any and all persuasive methods at their disposal. Unfortunately, the Winter Soldier was a need-to-know-only project, and not even some of the higher ranking officers knew about him.

He really was a ghost.

It was in Dallas at the fifty-third bunker they'd visited that Steve was ready to give up said ghost. Not one HYDRA agent that was still alive could tell them a thing about the Winter Soldier program, and there had only been one mention of him in all the hard copies they'd read. In a file on Kennedy, it was mentioned that "the asset" had been used.

Steve sat on a dusty bench in the dark bunker and sat his chin in the palm of his hand.

"My best friend shot the President," he sighed. Sam put his flashlight on the floor and joined his friend.

"That's rough, buddy," was the only thing he could think of to say. There wasn't really a right way to console someone in this situation. A long silence danced in front of them as the two men watched decade-old dust fly through the air.

"He shot the president," Steve went on, "and several other leaders of the free world." There was a heavy pause. "I think he killed Howard Stark."

Sam turned towards his friend. "Howard Stark? As in, Stark Industries? Father to one of your little friends in spandex?" Steve nodded.

"Should probably avoid telling Tony about that one," he laughed. That would make for an awkward meeting. Hi, I'm Bucky Barnes, I murdered your parents and effectively ruined your life, nice to meet you.

Steve's phone buzzed in his pocket. It was probably Maria again; the ex-agent had been helping them along in their investigation, pointing them in any helpful direction she could. Steve set aside all crestfallen feelings for the time being and at least tried to sound hopeful. But when he pulled out the sleek device, a different name flashed on the screen.

"Speak of the devil," Steve mumbled, swiping Tony's face across the screen to accept the call. He switched on speaker for Sam. "Tony," he said, "how are things in the big city?"

"Peachy. Stopped a couple terrorist organizations, saved the president, Thor's back from his family vacation, and that spider kid wrecked Times Square. You know how it is, Cap."

"Need any help?"

"Actually, I'm here to help you. You said to keep an eye out for anything related to your friend from the glory days. Well, guess who just popped up on the radar."

Steve's heart stopped. He exchanged glances with Sam, who looked just as anticipatory. "What d'you have for me, Stark?"

You could practically hear the smirk in Tony's voice. "I had JARVIS running a constant sweep on all of New York's assets: credit card sales, library cards, utility bills, security footage, anything."

"So, you essentially spied on an entire city," Sam commented.

"Picked up a few pointers from this intelligence organization, maybe you've heard of them- oh wait, you helped dismantle them. Right. Who is this guy, Cap?"

"Name's Falcon. Helped saved the world a few months back," Sam quipped.

"Good for you, you want a trophy? Try doing it on a daily basis."

"Stark, Falcon, focus. Tony, what did you find?"

"Someone on the East side of Brooklyn just paid their water bill under the name James Barnes. Security footage from a nearby gas station shows a man that fits your description. Really let himself go, though; I guess losing his HYDRA buddies really took it outta him."

So that's where he'd been hiding. They'd only left New York a few weeks ago; they could have walked right past him.

"Looks like he went back home. His memories must be coming back," Steve said. He sighed. "Thanks for letting us know, Tony. I owe you one."

"I accept all forms of payment, including cash, checks, and blood samples."

"I told you, Tony, that's too risky."

"Bruce'd love to see what makes you tic, Cap."

Steve shook his head. "I'll call you if we need back-up. See you in New York." A final swipe across the screen and the call ended.

"So, that's Iron Man, huh?" Sam asked. "What a dick."

"He's better once you get to know him," said the Captain, adjusting the shield on his back. In one swift motion, he stood up and kicked the flashlight off the ground with his toes. He shined it in Sam's face. "You ready to see the Big Apple?"

His friend grinned. "Let's do this."

* * *

He couldn't go to work anymore. He couldn't go to the store anymore. He couldn't leave his house anymore. He could hardly leave his bed anymore.

His body had changed into something different, something… grotesque. That small swell in his stomach that had saved the mugger's life a few months ago was now a veritable protuberance in his midsection, starting at the bottom of his ribcage and sitting low on his hips. Any shirt he had barely covered it. His skin stretched uncomfortably around it, making deep purple tiger stripes on his side. It wasn't soft like fat, nor was it hard or tumorous. It simply felt like an extension of his body.

It moved. Every now and then, he could feel something just beneath his skin, like something was flying or swimming around in there. More recently, he could even see something push against his skin, making a small bump on his flesh.

It scared him.

Not so much as when he discovered he was being followed, though. Bucky chanced a venture out into the world every few weeks to stock up on essentials, and only at night when not as many people could stare at him and his deformity. One night, he was trudging back to his apartment, feeling hungry and sick and tired, when he heard the scuff of a shoe from behind him. Turning around, he didn't see anyone. It would've been better if he had seen someone; now he knew they were hiding.

This happened again and again, until he was sure he was followed as far as his apartment building. He considered going out one night just to confront whoever this was- he was a trained assassin, after all. No one bested him at sneaking. But ever since the growth had gotten bigger, he'd felt more listless and lethargic, not wanting to walk around his home so much as stalk and confront his stalker.

As it turned out, though, he didn't even need to lift a finger. They came right to him.

Eight or nine months after the Helicarrier fell(he'd begun to lose track), Bucky was laying on his couch, feeling sorry for himself. He'd been doing that a lot lately, if nothing else but for a lack of anything else to do. His job had fired him for never coming in, and he wasn't about to apply for anything else.

He was sure that this thing inside of him was killing him. It would make it so that he couldn't move at all, getting so big that it would split his skin. It would crawl out into the world and do whatever HYDRA had programmed it to do. It must have been a failsafe, in case the Winter Soldier ever turned on them. An organism planted inside of him with a time release, slowly killing him from the inside out.

As the former soldier lay there, he heard footsteps. From outside his open second-story window, he heard the shuffle of about three or four men. He stopped breathing so as to catch every sound. They stopped in front of his building and stayed for a while. Maybe they're just a bunch of kids, Bucky thought, out on the prowl in the middle of the night. Loitering in front of buildings. Maybe they actually live here. There was nothing to worry about. Until he heard the sound of a lock breaking.

As footsteps thundered up the stairs, Bucky grabbed the gun from the coffee table and lept behind the couch, suddenly invigorated with the possibility that he may have to fight for his life. As the group got closer to his apartment, their movements got slower and more catlike. Bucky recognized the footwork; they were closing in on their prey. Voices could now be heard just outside the door. Through a fine-tuned ear, Bucky heard one voice that was familiar.

The door was kicked open with a slam and bounced off the wall. Guns that had been primed long before they'd reached the building were set into shoulders and aimed. There were three men. Two medium sized agents and one larger, more agile one. Bucky recognized the familiar click of a standard-issue M4 carbine on all three agents; they were likely packing other close range side-arms. All Bucky had was a Ruger semiautomatic with half a magazine. Not to mention he was significantly weighed down. This wasn't going to be easy.

Through a reflection in the window, he saw the two smaller agents in HYDRA uniform with face masks and goggles. The kind of expendable he used to work with. The third one was the voice he'd recognized earlier; Agent Brock Rumlow, head of Pierce's personal guard and strike team. His face was now covered by what looked like a luchador mask, and in lieu of the all-black uniform, he had white straps criss-crossing his torso in a big X. Firearms littered his thighs and belt; he was a walking arsenal.

In the silence broken only by the creak of leather and the rattle of weapons, Bucky heard quiet taunts. Rumlow never could resists the cliche of the loud-mouthed cutthroat. "Where are you… come out, come out…"

Bucky kept his eyes trained on the reflection. If he focused and kept his reflexes sharp, he could take down the two lackies in one motion before Rumlow even registered he was there. Looking down at his hands, he saw his right was shaky from lack of food and sleep, so he switched to his left. His eyes flicked to the window. The men were coming closer. Just a little more…

Bucky shot up from behind the couch and fired- one, two. Both agents were down, and now Rumlow knew his location. He somersaulted around the couch, evading sloppy shots from the agent. He was worse at this than Bucky remembered.

"Show your face, you puppet!" Rumlow yelled, his voice muffled strangely by the mask. "You can't win this!" Oh, but Bucky would try.

He had two bullets left. He would only need the one.

Bucky stood up and faced the ex-agent with fire in his eyes. He wasn't going to die tonight. Rumlow saw him and brought his gun up, but hesitated. It was impossible to tell, but this was where Rumlow would usually smirk.

"You have something that belongs to HYDRA," he growled. "I'm here to take it back."

So he was after the arm. Bucky had become a traitor to whatever was left of the Nazi organization; he was replaceable. There are always more workers. But the arm was priceless- the product of years of research and funding. They weren't letting it go so easily.

"HYDRA is dead," Bucky mumbled, buying time to get his stamina back. That would be easy; Rumlow loved to talk. "You're all that's left."

The agent shook his head. "No, that's where you're wrong. It's me," he then gestured with his gun to Bucky's engorged middle, "and him. We're all that's left."

Bucky froze. Rumlow obviously wasn't referring to him, so when he pointed to Bucky's stomach, did he mean…

He'd never really thought about it, because it seemed so far-fetched. But nothing could be too far-fetched when you were a time-travelling cyborg assassin. Could it be possible that the thing inside of him wasn't a monster put there by HYDRA… but a baby? An actual human child? Why would Zola give him the ability to have children? What could they possibly gain from this? And how did Rumlow find out? He was starting to feel sick.

Bucky must have looked thoroughly confused at this point, so much that Rumlow laughed.

"Oho man, don't tell me you didn't know?" he laughed. "This is great. You know, HYDRA has known for years. They do blood tests every time you go in and out of cryo, you know that? There were plans, that as soon as you were too incapacitated to do your job, your mind would be put into stasis while your body rode out the pregnancy. You would've never even known."

If they'd known, why hadn't they just told him? It wasn't like Bucky had been in any place to resist or defy them. The Winter Soldier had been programmed to follow orders.

The two assassins kept their weapons trained on each other for what felt like an eternity. At least, to Bucky's aching ankles it felt like an eternity.

"I'll tell you what we're gonna do," Rumlow went on, taking one cautious step closer to his target. "Since I don't want to hurt him, I don't wanna hurt you. So you're gonna put your gun down, and we're going to leave the city. You're gonna give birth, and then, me and him? We're gonna rebuild HYDRA. It'll be bigger and better than ever before, and more ruthless. I, Crossbones, will raise him to be my successor, and then HYDRA will be free to give the world the freedom it deserves, for generations to co-"

Bucky shot him in the throat. Rumlow did love to talk.

The ex-agent fell to the floor. As Bucky watched him writhe around, choking on his own blood, he set a hand on his very large, very taut stomach. So, it was a baby.

Bucky Barnes smiled sadly. At least he was adding something good to the world, then. After all he'd taken away, he was long overdue.

He dropped his gun and went to the bedroom. He'd need to leave, and soon. Someone had most likely reported the gunshots, and there was no way he could hide the bodies or the evidence in his condition. He needed to pack it all up and leave. He didn't know where he would go, but at least now he knew he had company.

Bucky pulled a dusty backpack from the closet and threw it on the bed. It was joined with several shirts and pairs of pants, but he had to stop as he let out a loud yell. His knees hit the floor, followed by the rest of his body. His belly was cramping up, tightening and squeezing the life out of him. Bucky was in massive amounts of pain, and it was coming from inside.

He screamed.

* * *

"We're going to stake it out for a while first, to see if Tony's intel is right."

"The dude's got New York City under his thumb. I dunno how it could be wrong."

"I'm just saying, there could be a lot of guys named James Barnes."

"Whatever you say, Cap." Sam put the Chevy in park and rolled the windows down. They both unclicked their seatbelts and settled in for what was they both thought was going to be a long night.

Until they both heard gunshots coming from the apartment.

Without so much as exchanging a glance, Steve grabbed his shield and Sam grabbed his gun and the two sprinted across the street. Had they been sitting there a little longer, they would have noticed the kicked-in front door. Light streamed out onto the street as Sam and Steve run up the marble-tiled stairs. Another shot was heard. They ran faster.

Bucky's supposed apartment was on the second floor to the right. As they approached, they both brandished their weapons with deadly intent. Steve wasn't going to let anything happen to Bucky and Sam wasn't going to let anything happen to Steve.

The captain raised an open hand and signaled to lay low outside the battered door frame until he could get a handle on the situation. From the hallway, the two men could see the feet of at least one fallen soldier. The smell of blood and gunpowder floated poignantly in the air.

Steve was starting to stand up slowly when a loud, desperate scream filled the hall. Steve ran in, Sam hot on his tail.

"Bucky!" Steve called, searching the apartment for his friend.

"Steve-!" A strangled cry came from the bedroom, and that's where both men went. As soon as they rounded the corner, they saw yet another body, only this one was breathing and reaching out for help. Bucky had one arm, a metal one, stretched out into the hall, grabbing at the floor. The other arm was wrapped around some kind of bulge under his shirt.

As Steve stooped down to hoist his friend up, he noticed the wild, panicked look on his face. Bucky's legs were tucked close to his body, and there was sweat beading on his forehead. His whole form was curled into a tight ball.

"Hey, were you hit?" Steve asked frantically. "Tell me where you're hurt, we can get you to a hospital-"

He was cut off as Bucky let out another scream, this one drawn out and raw. As he did, he tightened his grip on Steve's arm and around his belly. That was when Steve noticed something was… off.

Bucky relaxed after another few seconds of yelling and writhing, and when he did, Steve started to gently pry his limbs open. When he had his friend on his back, with his head in his lap, Steve saw that there was more to Bucky than when he'd last seen him.

"Buck, what…" Steve stuttered, but couldn't quite find the words. "What is this…?"

It took a while for Bucky to get his breath back enough to answer. He looked his friend in the eyes for the first time in nine months, and before that, the first time in seventy years.

"I'm pregnant, Steve."

There was silence except for Bucky's labored breathing as the other two men absorbed the knowledge. This was hard to believe for Steve, who'd fought evil scientists and robots and aliens, let alone Sam, who was just a normal soldier. The Falcon holstered his gun and joined the other two on the floor.

"...Pregnant?" he asked. "As in… like a woman, pregnant? With a baby?"

"Pretty sure that's what pregnant means, Sam," Steve remarked, still looking shocked and confused himself. "Buck, how long have you known?"

"Yeah, this woulda been nice to know when we were trying to kill you."

"Hey, I just found out five minutes ago, pal," Bucky said with a groan.

"You mean you went through a whole pregnancy without knowing you were even pregnant? Buck-!" Steve exclaimed, sounding exasperated and now genuinely concerned.

"Don't act like this is my fault!" Bucky all but yelled. "HYDRA put it in me, alright? And HYDRA just tried to take it away."

Sam nodded towards the living room where blood was seeping into the hardwood floors. "Is that who that is? HYDRA?"

Bucky nodded. "Rumlow and two other agents showed up. I took them out- _aaahh!_" He writhed in Steve's grip as he let out another scream.

"Bucky, you gotta calm down," Steve soothed, "we're gonna get through this-"

"Get it out of me, Steve!" Bucky continued to scream. No doubt someone had already called the cops for the gunshots. Now they had a noise complaint on their hands.

"We have to get him back to the tower," said Steve, reaching into his pocket. Out came the cell phone, and with one voice command, Tony's face was on the screen. The phone went into Steve breast pocket while he tried to help his laboring friend sit up.

"Never pegged you as a night-owl, Cap," Tony's snarky voice said from Steve's shirt.

"That's the pot calling the kettle black, Stark. This is an emergency."

"You know how I get all tingly when you use old-person slang. Whad'ya need?"

"A doctor. Someone we can trust."

"You hit?"

"We found Bucky."

"Is he hit? ...Is that screaming?"

"Just get me a doctor, Stark. I'll be at the tower in ten minutes." The call ended with a definite click. Bucky was leaning up against the bed, clutching onto Steve's hand for dear life. His eyes were wide with panic and sweat rolled down his cheek.

Sam glanced over at Steve. "That's a twenty minute drive, man. At least."

"Then we better hurry." Steve got Bucky to sling his arms around his neck, then he slipped his arm under his friend's legs and lifted him bridal. "Let's move."

Sam grabbed the shield and followed, mumbling under his breath, "boy gotta weigh three hundred pounds and he lifts him like he's a supermodel, damn…"

* * *

That he now knew that what was really inside of him was a baby did nothing to change Bucky's opinion that this thing was killing him slowly. He couldn't imagine a worse pain; although he was sure if he remembered the pain of having his arm torn off, he'd have something to compare it to.

He was glad, grateful even, that Steve had come when he did. A little sooner would've been nice also, but beggars couldn't be choosers. He sat next to his old friend in the back of a speeding car. Buildings whizzed past in a blur, other cars becoming no more than fireflies. Whoever this Sam was, he was a great driver. Bucky searched his recently-opened memory banks and found he didn't have to search far to find his last meeting with Sam Wilson, codename Falcon.

"I ripped your wing off," Bucky said breathlessly.

"Yeah, thanks for that," Sam yelled above the roar of the engine. They heard sirens in the distance.

"Sorry about that," replied Bucky, trying to shift into a more comfortable position, also while trying not to get thrown around the back seat.

"Y'know, you might be one of the most polite assassins I've ever met." A taxi pulled out in front of them, effectively blocking off the road. Sam let out a shout as he swerved onto the sidewalk, almost hitting two trees, a meter, and a few pedestrians. After a quick rebound off the curb, and they were back in a lane.

As he felt another cramp beginning to take hold, Bucky reached out wildly for something to grab onto. Steve's hand met him in midair, and he squeezed into and oblivion. It was a good thing Steve was a super-soldier, or there might've been some broken broken bones.

The hum of pistons and the wail of sirens were both drowned out by fresh screams. Bucky leaned as far over his stomach as he could, trying to keep the pain contained.

"Hang in there, Buck, alright?" Steve urged, wrapping a protective arm around his friend's shoulders. "We're almost there, you just have to hang in there."

Bucky nodded stiffly. His eyes were screwed shut and he clenched his jaw so tight he thought his teeth might crack. Sweat dripped from his brow.

He'd hold on for Steve, but he wasn't sure how much control he had over the situation. If the baby was coming, it would arrive any time it damn well pleased. He could only breathe and pray they made it to the tower in time.


End file.
